Celtic Bank’s Mesa Visa card has a storied past with sign-up bonuses, and they’re continuing that legacy with another harebrained scheme:
– 5,000 bonus points for one Mesa referral – 5,000 additional bonus points for another referral – 50,000 bonus points after two referrals and spending $10,000 in 90 days
The card recently became a churning classic because: (1) you earn points for your, err *cough* mortgage, even if you don’t use the card to pay it, and (2) they have interesting transfer partners like SAS EuroBonus and Air Canada Aeroplan.
The Chase Ink Cash and Ink Unlimited Visa cards have heightened sign-up bonuses of 90,000 Ultimate Rewards after $6,000 spend in three months. Both cards are no-annual fee cards.
These are available via referrals and you’ve still got a few weeks left before October 7, when Chase’s referral rules mean there’s no referral bonus if the card applicant already holds a Chase business card.
Since for some reason we don’t talk about Kroger 4x without talking about Pepper: They’re still quasi-dead, which is to say they’ve been a few days away from relaunch for months.
Kroger online has 5% off of Visa and Mastercard e-gift cards with promo code BDAY2025 through September 21. Mastercards had been absent from Kroger since they switched issuers from US Bank, but they’re now back.
These are generally interesting because they earn Kroger fuel points, not because it codes as grocery (it doesn’t). These are Pathward / Incomm gift cards.
Several banks have emailed targeted spend bonuses:
– Discover: $10 off $100+ spend with a virtual card number – Bank of America: $75 or 7,500 points with $2,500 spend – Chase Freedom: Extra earn with spend thresholds
(Thanks to Dave and T)
Have a nice weekend friends!
Marriott had to drop support for Asiana transfers to implement this correctly.
One of my favorite ways to think about relationships with banks and FinTechs is “how much would you have to pay me to never use [institution] again?” (The severed relationship question)
My answer varies greatly depending on the institution, ranging from probably $500 (let’s say RobinHood), to $1 Million.
When a shutdown from a bank or a FinTech happens, I like to reframe the shutdown in terms of the severed relationship question and look back on my earnings. For example, if RobinHood gives me the almighty 🪓 and I earned over $500 from games with their app, then I got at least the value of the severed relationship question, so I can frame the shutdown as a success rather than as a blow.
As a bonus, I may find my way back into an institution that shut me down, which lets the game start over; sometimes when you’re shutdown, it’s just another opportunity to answer the severed relationship question for a second (or third) time.
Valuations are notoriously hard and opinionated, but I’d suggest that you drop your own Hilton valuation by at least 25-30% unless you have your own private unicorn. Personally, I’m treating them as worth 0.3 cents each.
It’s worth checking existing travel plans that were booked after May 27 because you’ll be operating under the same fare and checked bags scheme. For travel plans booked before, ymmv.
Stop & Shop, Giant Foods, and Martins stores have 8x points on both Amazon and Zift Zillions gift cards through Thursday, limit $2,000 spend per account.
Have a nice Wednesday!
New perk: This Hilton Garden Inn’s 30% award rate increase comes with complimentary fire (included with resort fee)
– If your application wasn’t wildly different than the 4506-C numbers, you’ll be fine – This appears to be a bug in Citi’s IT systems, not a crusade to out churners – Going for a double dip with these links increases the likelihood of 4506-C requests – The form is available your message center if you’ve enabled paperless statements – Both online and in-branch approvals are affected
For a non-mainstream take on the risk versus reward of using the heightened offer links, see Chasing Cetaceans, my favorite new churning blog.
American Express quagmire elevator games are dead and have been for a few weeks. Based on other system updates, I don’t think they’re coming back either.
If you don’t know what this means, it doesn’t affect you. #crypticmeab
The Barclays Hawaiian Mastercard and the Bank of Hawaii Mastercard both have increased sign-up offers:
– Barclays: 80,000 HawaiianMiles after $2,500 spend in three months, use random numbers for promo code – Bank of Hawaii: 50,000+30,000 Hawaiian Miles after $2,000 in 90 days and $5,000 in 180 days, respectively
These miles will become Alaska Atmos miles at the end of the month, and presumably you won’t be able to get either card after that point. You don’t seem to be able to get both versions of this card any more.
– 1 round trip: 5,000 bonus points – 2 round trips: 5,000 additional bonus points – 3 round trips: 5,000 additional bonus points – 4 round trips: a Companion Pass valid between January 6, 2026 and March 6, 2026
There are also various targeted status shortcut promotions available, check your promotions at the bottom of your My Account page.
Some airline shopping portals have sweepstakes for winning lots of miles and cash, and you can register to enter by logging in at one of the sweepstakes pages (churners have occasionally won these in prior years):
Chase has new targeted offers for both its Freedom cards and United cards, you can check your eligibility at chase.com/mybonus, ideally in a new incognito window for each card. Offers include 3x-5x earning at gas, EV charging, and groceries on up to $1,500 spend through November 30, a fixed bonus on 20 purchases monthly for three months, and 10,000-15,000 bonus points on $3,000-$4,000 spend.
The American Express Delta cards have heightened sign-up bonuses, coming back a short three days after the targeted NLL versions expired. The Gold and Reserve offers beat the last round’s bonuses, while the Platinum cards are each slightly lower. Spend requirements were tweaked slightly too:
– Personal Gold: 80,000 SkyMiles after $3,000 spend in six months, annual-fee waived – Personal Platinum: 90,000 SkyMiles after $4,000 spend in six months – Personal Reserve: 125,000 SkyMiles after $6,000 spend in six months – Business Gold: 90,000 SkyMiles after $6,000 spend in six months, annual-fee waived – Business Platinum: 100,000 SkyMiles after $8,000 spend in six months – Business Reserve: 125,000 SkyMiles after $15,000 spend in six months
– $500 with $5,000 in deposits held for 60 days (effectively a 60% APR when annualized) – $1,000 with $30,000 in deposits held for 60 days (effectively a 20% APR when annualized)
Both require 10 transactions, but $1 ACHs back and forth will do. These bonuses are churnable every 180 days. (Thanks to DDG)
– 140,000 points after $4,000 spend in three months – 60,000 points after $9,000 spend in six months
This card’s annual free-night certificate is for nights up to 40,000 points. The offer is available via referral, so use another player’s or another churner’s referral instead of the public link.
Southwest will have free-WiFi onboard starting on October 24. This sounds great, other than that they’ll still have their legacy inflight internet system which was already really slow when < 10% of the plane was using it. So, I guess each passenger will get to relive the 2,400 baud internet speeds of the early 1990s?
How many miles should you hold in a loyalty account before you start liquidating them or choosing to earn something else instead? My hand-wavey answer is: Hold as many as you’ll redeem between now and the next devaluation. Of course, we don’t really know when the next devaluation will happen, but we can look into the last 10 years to try and find patterns on a program specific level.
Why Programs Devalue
Before we do that, let’s remind ourselves why devaluations happen:
Inflation happens, and mileage earning is tied to prices
Airline CASM increases over time
Hotel CPOR increases over time
Devaluing a currency helps a balance sheet
Devaluations suck, but they’re entirely predictable over time. If we take as a given that programs will devalue, the next logical question is “how often?”
The Frequency
I collected data for frequent flyer program devaluations from the year 2015 until now for the major five US airlines. For this dataset, I only considered redemption devaluations; I excluded elite program changes, the removal of free-stop overs, and similar perks that aren’t directly tied to the mileage redemption rate. Some of these devaluations were only for specific types of redemptions (for example, partner awards to Europe), but that didn’t matter for this study. If redemptions devalued in some way, they were included here.
Now, let’s go airline by airline, sorted by frequency of devaluation:
Ok, now what’s the expectation value for a devaluation in each program, just taking the number of devaluations divided by the time period (10 years)?
Airline
Devaluation Time (Expectation Value)
Standard Deviation
Delta
1.00 years
0.42 years
United
1.67 years
1.05 years
Southwest
2.00 years
0.88 years
Alaska
2.00 years
1.11 years
AA
3.33 years
1.82 years (sqrt(3/10))
What do I do with that?
Alright, how do you make this data actionable? Well let’s go back to my hand-wavey metric for when you should stop holding miles in a particular program: Hold as many as you’ll redeem between now and the next devaluation.
That means that I wouldn’t hold more Delta SkyMiles than I’m likely to redeem in the next 1.00 years, or at least the next 1.00 years after October 2023 (😬 Spoiler alert: It seems likely that we’re going to see another Delta devaluation soon.) It’s also yet another argument about why you should be holding flexible currencies that transfer multiple places and can be cashed out directly.
Normally I’d just get an Ink, but there’s value in this card with (1) an award companion pass valid for all cabins on British Airways metal after $30,000 spend, (2) a 10% discount on paid British Airways fares, and (3) a $100-$200 statement credit for award fees per booking, but maxed out at $600 per year.
If you think this card is a snooze-fest, you may want to take another look, at least if you live near an airport served by Virgin Atlantic or by a Virgin Hotel.
– 2,500 bonus miles on a $250+ hotel booking with promo code STAYCATION – 5,000 bonus miles on a $500+ hotel booking with promo code BACKTOSCHOOL
Rove already earns 10x-20x miles for hotel stays, so for the right use case there’s value here, but if you’re never paying cash for hotels, this probably doesn’t move the needle. If you’re going to sign-up for Rove, use a referral link and both the referrer and referred will get 1,000 bonus miles and there’s an extra 10% boost on earning for the referrer.
Happy Thursday!
The average churner’s picture of the Virgin Red Mastercard.
